Here are a few demoscene videos showing the demos from back when I ran a BBS on a 386 and 486 in the mid 90’s. I remember being amazed the first time I ran these demos on my IBM PS/1 386SX 16mhz PC with 2MB of ram and a 42MB hard drive. These were pushing the limits of what the hardware of the day could do with highly optimized code and custom written hardware interface routines. These demos were tiny and would fit on a 1.44MB floppy disk. Now even a super simple minimal app on my iPhone is 100MB… I wish some of today’s programmers would learn to optimize their code to squeeze the most performance out of even older and slower hardware.
Iguana - Heartquake (1994) [60fps]
Second Reality HD - Framed for 16:9, 720 @ 60p
Unreal 1.0 by Future Crew (pc demo)
Something else for the pre-Windows DOS PC users, anyone remember S3M files… I had hundreds of S3M files on my BBS back in the 90’s. At some point I am going to try and recover some of the old backups and files from the Syquest Puma 105MB external parallel port hard drive cartridges and some of the old tape backups if I can find the software and build up a computer that can operate the floppy disk controller interface tape drive. I still have everything from back then somewhere… Just got to find it…
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I wish some of today’s programmers would learn to optimize their code to squeeze the most performance out of even older and slower hardware
Agreed! they should try to make it run smoothly on a raspberry pi zero with a full Desktop Environment. Actually I challenge anyone on @Team_VCC to prove that it can be done still; that a modern program can run beyond smoothly in under 8mb of ram and 50mhz cpu.
Define “modern program…”
Not BASIC or Pascal. 
otherwise I’ll leave that open to the coder.